nce of social
order and moral conduct depended. The general position was clearly
apprehended, and was accepted as if beyond dispute. Men spoke and
thought of the Order of Nature. The world was a Cosmos, a regulated
system. Order implied an Orderer. It was regarded by them as obvious
that there must have been a First Cause, a great Architect and Maker of
the Universe. They agreed with Aquinas that "things which have no
perception can only tend toward an end if directed by a conscious and
intelligent being. Therefore there is an {14} Intelligence by which
all natural things are ordered to an end."[1] They were fully prepared
to endorse the indignant protest of Bacon: "I had rather believe all
the folly of the 'Legend,' and the 'Talmud,' and the 'Alcoran,' than
that this universal frame is without a mind."[2] In fact no other
hypothesis seemed to them thinkable.

If at any time they felt a need for a more elaborate justification of
their conviction, they had it ready to their hand in the familiar
argument from design. Paley, when he set this out in his famous
_Natural Theology_ (1802), was only expressing with conspicuous ability
the view that was then accepted in all circles from the highest to the
lowest. He was preaching to those who were already in the fullest
accord with his doctrine. They followed with eager approbation his
reasoning about the watch that he supposed himself to have found on the
heath. According to his assumption he had never seen a watch made, nor
known of anyone capable of making such a thing. He concludes,
nevertheless, that it must have been made by someone. "There must have
existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or
artificers who formed it for {15} the purpose which we find it actually
to answer; who comprehended its structure, and designed its use."
"Neither would it invalidate our conclusion that the watch sometimes
went wrong, or that it seldom went exactly right. The purpose of the
machinery, the design and the designer, might be evident in whatever
way we accounted for the irregularity of the movement, or whether we
could account for it at all." "Nor would it bring any uncertainty into
the argument if there were a few parts of the watch concerning which we
could not discover, or had not yet discovered, in what manner they
conducted to the general effect; or even some parts concerning which we
could not ascertain whether they conducted to that effect